Monday, June 16, 2014

I can’t say that I think the idea of tidiness or cleaning
for a children’s book would be all that relevant or of interest. But after going through this very quirky
book, I’m willing to change my mind. I
think it will hold and engage almost anyone.

Ursus Wehrli , besides being uber-organized, is a
typographer, a comedian, live performer and freelance artist. His humour and penchant for ‘tidying’ things
is played out with flare in this book.

Let me give you some examples. On each set of facing pages we are given a
photo of a fairly commonplace scene from everyday life. Clothes hanging out to dry, a child playing
in a sand box, an aerial view of a car park or a school ground with playing
children, a bouquet of flowers, a decorated Christmas tree or a pile of
pretzels to give you a range of the mundane and ordinary that we surround
ourselves with.

But if you were to take the ‘chaos’ away from each of these
and prettied them up, life would be less jumbled, way more orderly and colour
coded to boot.

Clothes on a clothesline would be grouped according to
colour and displayed rainbow-like. The
child playing in the sandbox with various plastic toys, would now be sitting
(and no doubt marveling) at very neatly arranged rows of pails, rakes and
shovels, sieves, watering cans, sand molds and dump trucks displayed on freshly
raked sand. The messy mound of bent pretzels is now shown
as two rows of straightened, salted snack food.
Who knew that a Christmas tree ‘broken down’ into its component parts
would equal a pile of needles, a bundle of kindling, one stand, a coil of
tinsel, one pointy tree topper and several rows of red and silver round
ornaments, hooks and lights? Kind of
takes the romance away, but that’s what makes it funny. It plays with our expectations. Now if only I could get my decorations to
look even half as neat.

It becomes somewhat of a game trying to see all the
components between the before and after pictures. Take a look at the book cover above. What are those white dots lined up with all
the various pieces of fruit found in a bowl of fruit salad? Why it’s the polka dots that were on the
bowl, of course.

Besides the visual humour factor, I do think there could be
some classroom application when it comes to pattern making and observation
skills. This isn’t the book you’d use to
introduce young children to the concept of patterns in the earliest primary
grades. But older children will be able to work things out. Might be a book that you can model your own
attempts to tidy up and get organized once and for all. Not a crucial resource but one that is lots of fun.

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About Me

I am the reference coordinator at The Doucette Library of Teaching Resources, a curriculum library in the Werklund School of Education at the University of Calgary.
I love connecting education students and teachers with engaging and exciting resources for classroom teaching. I believe that resources that get me excited (or those that get you excited) are the ones with the best potential to get kids interested in learning about - well, everything. Finding those books that connect to the real world are the ones I enjoy promoting the most.